John 12:34 - Exposition

The audience of Jesus on this occasion has swollen into a vast group. The few Greeks, with Philip and Andrew, the other disciples, the smaller circle of sympathetic listeners, the disturbed and feverish crowd, are all about him, as he claims by death itself to judge the world, to win all men, and east out the spirit and prince of the world from his usurped throne. The multitude then £ answered him, We heard —received information by public teaching— out of the Law that the Christ abideth forever. Numerous passages may have been reasonably in their minds— Psalms 110:1-7 .; Isaiah 9:1-21 .; Ezekiel 37:25 ; Daniel 7:13 , Daniel 7:14 —in which the glories of an everlasting kingdom were predicted. In Daniel 7:23 the Lord had in their hearing spoken of himself as "Son of man." Meyer, by giving the dominant sense of glorification to the ὑψώθω , thinks that the people must be contrasting, in pert criticism, the lowly "Son of man" before them with the "Son of man" of Daniel's vision. But it would be far more probable that the people accepted Christ's intimation of the manner of his death, and hence felt the incongruity of such a Son of man—One who dies, and therefore lives again—with the glowing pictures of Daniel or the 'Book of Henoch.' "The Christ abideth forever." And how sayest thou that the Son of man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of man? They did not identify "the Son of man" with the Messiah. They probably supposed two manifestations. They may have doubted, as John the Baptist did, whether Jesus had fulfilled the whole conception of the ἐρχόμενος . It was once more a vague, dull inquiry, "Who art thou?" We are still in doubt who thou art, and how thou canst claim to be the Christ of our prophecies. To be our Christ, and die, is a contradiction in terms.